Recordings and Compositions

Ed Dorn, ‘Walking the Dog Seminar Lecture, December 7, 1978’. An audio recording of the lecture (1 hour 51 min.) is online at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dorn.php. [Dorn discusses with Robert Creeley and the audience Prynne’s impressions of Dorn’s Gunslinger, from [35.56–37.07]].

Ed Dorn, ‘Reading for the Olson Lectures, March 1981: Lecture 1 (March 19, 1981)’ [the first of three lectures by Edward Dorn in the Charles Olson Memorial Lectures series]. An audio recording of the lecture (51.52 min.) is online at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dorn.php. [Dorn reads and discusses Prynne’s 22 February 1981 letter to Dorn [pp. 4, discussing the Naropa Poetry Wars, Tom Clark and British and American poetry], from [41.50–51.52]]. This lecture, and the third of the three lectures in the series [late March 1981 [exact date unknown]], but not the second lecture in the series [March 24, 1981], are transcribed by Lindsey M. Freer and published as Edward Dorn, Charles Olson Memorial Lectures, ed. Lindsey M. Freer (New York: Lost and Found (CUNY Poetics Document Initiative), Fall 2012). Prynne’s letter [as read by Dorn and transcribed by Freer] published on pp. 27–31 of that volume.

Ed Dorn, ‘Reading for the Olson Lectures, March 1981: Lecture 2 (March 24, 1981)’ [the second of three lectures by Edward Dorn in the Charles Olson Memorial Lectures series]. An audio recording of the lecture (58.04 min.) is online at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dorn.php. [Dorn mentions Jeremy Prynne as an associate who has educated him ‘quite a lot’ [at ~3.05]].

Ed Dorn, ‘Reading for the Olson Lectures, March 1981: Lecture 3’ [late March 1981 [exact date unknown]] [the last of three lectures by Edward Dorn in the Charles Olson Memorial Lectures series]. An audio recording of the lecture (47.13 min.) is online at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dorn.php. [Dorn briefly discusses and reads a paragraph from J.H. Prynne’s 27 July 1971 lecture at Simon Fraser University, ‘On Maximus IV, V, VI’, from [5.00–7.10]]. This lecture, and the first of the three lectures in the series [March 19, 1981], but not the second lecture in the series [March 24, 1981], are transcribed by Lindsey M. Freer and published as Edward Dorn, Charles Olson Memorial Lectures, ed. Lindsey M. Freer (New York: Lost and Found (CUNY Poetics Document Initiative), Fall 2012). The quote from Prynne’s ‘On Maximus IV, V, VI’ [as read by Dorn and transcribed by Freer] published on p. 34 of that volume.

Out To Lunch [Ben Watson], Late Lunch with Out To Lunch [weekly 1-hour radio show Wednesdays at 2PM London time, on Resonance FM]. Frequent criticism and digestion through life practice, as well as readings of complete poems and poem sequences. As of February 2016, https://archive.org/ lists the following Prynne-related programs: ‘Irony, Volosinov and Indirect Speech’ (6 November 2002); ‘On Derek’ (7 May 2004) [sic; actually broadcast 7 May 2003]; ‘Chris McCabe Poet from Liverpool’ (29 June 2005); ‘Black Frost: The Present Situation Is Abstract’ (12 November 2008); ‘Girls and Boys Come Out to Play’ (18 February 2009); ‘Uncial Ledge Flip Transfer: New Prynne, Old Sounds’ (4 March 2009); ‘Tackling Trakl Defending Prynne’ (25 March 2009); ‘Smooch Tentet Resolve’ (various shows, June 2008 to July 2009); ‘Fox Reads Prynne’ (4 November 2009); ‘Epic’ (12 May 2010); ‘What’s Wrong With Time’ (9 June 2010); ‘Evil Saved My Dick’ (10 August 2011); ‘Alive Alive-O’ (18 January 2012); ‘Anti-Academic, Moi?’ (1 February 2012); ‘Iris, Beatles, Beethoven’ (15 February 2012); ‘A Universe of Continuous Jostling’ (5 December 2012); ‘Sentiment’ (19 December 2012); ‘Play of Unity’ (16 January 2013); ‘Unchoir Involute’ (6 March 2013); ‘Wry Mass Tick Felony’ (4 December 2013); ‘Easter Kids and Dorm Eviction’ (8 April 2014); ‘Panjandrum Logic’ (17 December 2014); ‘Eugeneology’ (18 March 2015); ‘Evil Thwarted’ (25 March 2015); ‘Wots Left’ (1 April 2015); and ‘Scandal Cancel’ (13 January 2016). Also, Out To Lunch uploaded an audio file that wasn’t played on his radio show of a complete reading of J.H. Prynne, Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is, with recorded musical interludes by Derek Bailey, online at https://archive.org/details/OutToLunchReadsKazooDreamboatsI-2012. Also, the following Late Lunch radio shows featured readings or discussions of Prynne texts but have not yet been uploaded to https://archive.org/: ‘Now Hear This’ (16 July 2003); ‘Davies/Bohman/Lee at the RCA last night’ (25 November 2003); ‘Latest News From The Esemplasm’ (3 December 2003); ‘Xmas Eve Chromium Balls’ (24 December 2003); ‘OTL, Lol & Len: Cheap Freedom (ET #48)’ (2 November 2005); ‘Bonney’s Negative Poetix Manifesto #2, plus Rose Royce & Prynne’s A Note on Metal’ (8 February 2006); ‘Milton’s Satan meets Scratch Funk/Prynne Festschrift’ (16 August 2006); ‘Ascension II (Jaworzyn/Hession) at the Spitz Last Night’ (6 September 2006); and ‘Baby Language as Critique of Structuralist Linguistics’ (10 January 2007).

Erik Ulman compositions: ‘J.H. Prynne’s poetry is one of my favorite sources of inspiration. Four of my pieces are rooted specifically in his poems: L’Extase de M. Poher (originally written in 2002 and completely re-composed in 2006) and its variant and sequel Deuxième Extase (2003), both for solo cello; Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform (2004) for clarinet/bass clarinet, electric guitar, piano, violin, and cello; and a brief setting of Smooth Landing (2004) for soprano, piano, violin, and cello. Several future projects are also tied to Prynne’s work: a set of small piano pieces; chamber orchestral works named for Red D Gypsum and Unanswering Rational Shore; and a Troisième Exstase for cello and seven cellos on tape, further building (or feeding) on its predecessors. Some relationships between text and music are casual, even arbitrary; others approach programmatic absorption of a poem’s themes and energy.’ Erik Ulman, ‘Composing with Prynne’, in Search: Journal for New Music and Culture, 2 (Summer 2008): previously available online, though without the musical example from Ulman’s L’Extase de M. Poher, at http://www.searchnewmusic.org/index2.html. Subsequently reprinted in A Manner of Utterance: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009): 145–62 [145]. Subsequently reprinted again in The Second Century of New Music: Search Yearbook Volume 1, eds. Franklin Cox, Dániel Péter Biró, Alexander Sigman and Steven Kazuo Takasugi (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011): 377–96. [No recording of this music is yet available; though http://potoweb.org/festival/festival-iii/ mentions recordings of Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform and Third String Quartet; http://potoweb.org/festival/festival-iv/ mentions a video of Ulman’s cello piece L’Extase de M. Poher performed by Séverine Ballon at Musiques démesurées IX in Clermont-Ferrand; and http://potoweb.org/festival/festival-vi/ mentions an audio recording of Ulman’s cello piece L’Extase de M. Poher performed live in Stuttgart in May 2009].

Limescale, ‘The Army Stuffing Its Drum’, track 3 of Limescale (Incus CD56, 2003) [recorded December 2002]. [Limescale was a free improvisation quintet composed of Derek Bailey, guitar; Tony Bevan, bass saxophone; THF Drenching, dictaphone; Sonic Pleasure, bricks; and Alex Ward, clarinet. The sixth track on the album, ‘Titles by Drenching’, would suggest to the suggestible listener that the titles on the album were by THF Drenching, known also to readers of poetry and this bibliography as Stuart Calton. The title ‘The Army Stuffing Its Drum’, in lowercase, comes from the sixth-to-last line of J.H. Prynne, ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’].

David Caddy, ‘So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England’. Miporadio radio podcast series (December 2007 – September 2008): Letter 14 entirely; and int. al., 8, 9, 11, 15–16. Available as text and audio recordings online at http://davidcaddy.blogspot.com/search?q=prynne [approx. pp. 35 on Prynne]. A revised version of Letter 14 published in A Manner of Utterance: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009): 23–35. The full series of texts as originally podcast published as David Caddy, So Here We Are (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2012); Letter 14 is pp. 114–23.

Ken Fox, Naval Aviation in Audio [weekly 1-hour radio show Wednesdays at 11PM Central Standard time, on CJTR Regina. The final show, ‘Atlantis’ [episode 264], aired 18 June 2014]. ‘Pink Desert’ [episode 40, aired 19 September 2009], featured an on-air reading by Ken Fox of J.H. Prynne, High Pink on Chrome; Episode 40’s full reading of High Pink on Chrome rebroadcast on Out To Lunch [Ben Watson], Late Lunch with Out To Lunch, ‘Fox Reads Prynne’ (4 November 2009), online at https://archive.org/details/FoxReadsPrynne4-xi-2009. Ken Fox also read, on ‘Saturday Night Punks & Funk’ [Naval Aviation in Audio episode 132, aired 3 August 2011], J.H. Prynne, ‘The Numbers’, A Night Square, and Day Light Songs. On ‘Whipping Toy Forms’ [episode 200, aired 23 January 2013], Fox read part of J.H. Prynne, Biting the Air. On ‘Minute Men Blather Routine’ [episode 201, aired 30 January 2013], Fox read J.H. Prynne, A Night Square, ‘Of Sanguine Fire’, and the rest of Biting the Air, from where he’d left off in the previous episode. On ‘Wound Response’ [episode 227, aired 28 August 2013], Fox read J.H. Prynne, Wound Response. Episodes 200, 201, and 227 online at https://archive.org/search.php?query=naval%20aviation%20in%20audio. Fox’s blog with the radio show’s complete playlists is at http://navalaviationinaudio.blogspot.com.

Jenny Harris, audio recording of a reading of J.H. Prynne, ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ (3.45 min), posted 7 October 2010. Previously online at http://peoplereadingpoems.org/ [though as of September 2015 the domain name has expired].

Rhodri Davies, Wound Response (alt.vinyl LP038, 2012, remastered 2014) [recorded 11 December 2011]. Audio recording. Available as streaming mp3 as of 30 June 2016 at https://rhodridavies.bandcamp.com/album/wound-response. [Davies plays lap harp, transducer, contact microphone, overdrive, volume pedal and two amplifiers on this album. The album title is borrowed from the book by J.H. Prynne].

Wang Huaijian, song setting of a Chinese translation of J.H. Prynne, ‘Listening to All’ and song setting of J.H. Prynne, ‘[Jie ban mi Shi Hu]’ [written in Chinese in the original]. The songs are featured on Chapter 11 of Colin Still, producer and director, The Cambridge Quarterly – Cambridge English & China: A Colloquium – Work in Progress: A Reading to Celebrate the Publication of the Bi-Lingual Edition of the Selected Poems of J.H. Prynne (London: Optic Nerve, 2012), where they are sung by Rose [?] with flute accompaniment by Annie [?] [no further attributions given on the DVD]. The setting of ‘[Jie ban mi Shi Hu]’ is also played over the opening and closing credits of the DVD, on Chapters 1 and 12, respectively. [Any further information on these works would be much appreciated].

Binnsclagg, ‘Prynnesclagg’ (18 July 2012). Audio recording of the Brighton-based duo Binnsclagg, with text from J.H. Prynne, ‘Refuse Collection’ and To Pollen. Previously online at https://soundcloud.com/binnsclagg, though as of September 2015 it is no longer available.

Ian Brinton, ‘Ian Brinton on the poet Andrew Crosier’ [sic]. Audio recording of a lecture by Brinton at the Critical Poetics Seminars at the University of Sussex (uploaded 20 May 2014). (1 hour 49 min. 39 sec.). Recorded by Inedit Films. Online at https://vimeo.com/95845668. [On the poetic, critical and editorial career of Andrew Crozier, with numerous discussions and quotations from Prynne’s correspondence with Crozier regarding Crozier’s poems, The English Intelligencer, and The Wivenhoe Park Review, and an excerpt from Prynne’s ‘Introduction’ to Crozier’s Loved Litter of Time Spent].

Robert Potts, ‘J.H. Prynne: An Examination of Imagery’ (9 September 2015). Audio recording (streaming mp3) for TLS Voices, an online feature of the TLS [Times Literary Supplement], discussing and reading from J.H. Prynne, To Pollen. (9.37 min.). Online at https://soundcloud.com/the-tls/jh-prynne-an-examination-of-imagery. [The timing as follows: Robert Potts introduces a selection from To Pollen in the context of recent Euro-American imperial wars in the Middle East and their catastrophic consequences [0.00–3.45]; Robert Potts reads a selection from To Pollen, from page 21 to the end of the original sequence [i.e., J.H. Prynne, Poems [2015]: 590–92] [3.45–8.45]; advertisement for the TLS [8.45–9.37]].

David Coll, ‘Said What Choice Spoken’, for flute, piano, and percussion (audio recording uploaded 19 October 2015), inspired by Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage / ‘Artesian’. (7 min. 25 sec. [followed by 2 min. silence on the recording]). Online, with Coll’s brief note on Prynne’s poem in relation to his own composition, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40uJhMlGqkY.